This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Positioning technologies which are used mainly outdoors, such as satellite positioning systems (global navigation satellite systems, GNSS such as global positioning system GPS, GLONASS, Galileo) and cellular positioning technologies, may not deliver such a performance indoors that would enable seamless and equal navigation experience in both outdoors and indoors. The positioning accuracy of a couple of meters, coverage and floor detection are challenging to achieve with satisfactory performance levels with the systems and signals that were not designed and specified for the indoor use cases in the first place. Satellite-based radio navigation signals may not penetrate through the walls and roofs of many buildings strongly enough for the adequate signal reception and the cellular signals may have too narrow bands for accurate ranging by default.
Some indoor-dedicated solutions are based on so called pseudolites (GPS-like short-range beacons), ultra-sound positioning, Bluetooth® low energy (BTLE) signals and wireless local area network (WLAN) fingerprinting.
Outdoor and indoor positioning technologies may complement each other. On the one hand, the satellite positioning systems may provide accurate outdoor positioning in open sky but may start to degrade when a user comes closer to a building. On the other hand, indoor positioning technologies may provide accurate positioning, usually better than satellite positioning systems, inside buildings and in the vicinity of the buildings and degrade when a user goes away from the building.